Zoë's Dublin Diary: Bacchus, Fifi Rong, Spotlight, and More

In collaboration with Liam Slevin and Dan Guiney, multi-disciplinary artist Holly O’Brien is using costume, dance and sound to explore the underbelly, the underground, the mythological. Her background is in the expression of ritual through costume, referencing mythology, folklore and modern subcultures. Liam Slevin uses FX pedals, field recordings, loops and drums to create industrial sounds, while Dan Guiney has played as Strawk and POLYP, a collaboration with butoh dancer Claire Keating. Róisín Bohan, assistant curator at Temple Bar Gallery, has curated the performance. More details here.

American artist Amie Siegel is giving her first solo exhibition in Ireland, curated by Megs Morley. The exhibition will showcase her latest ventures in film, Quarry (2015) and The Architects (2014), both exploring the relationship between architecture and real estate. In one, the marble structure of a high-end Manhattan development is traced through to its beginnings in a Vermont quarry, a journey majestically scored by an orchestral soundtrack, and in another a camera bee-lines through the Manhattan cityscape, with the audience’s view obscured by screens, surfaces and windows. Facebook event here.

Bacchus are veterans of the Irish crust/hardcore scene, marrying crushing doom sounds with ragey reverb. They’ll be joined this Friday by Jungbluth from Münster, Germany, formed during hardcore group Alpinist’s 2012 hiatus. Named after antifascist World War Two resistance fighter Karl Jungbluth, the three-piece released their first LP, Lovecult, last September. More here.

The Irish Forum for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy (IFPP) and the Science Gallery are hosting a screening and discussion of The Act of Killing, Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 documentary. In fitting with the Science Gallery’s current exhibition, the discussion will be focused around trauma and its representation and experience, both as viewer and sufferer, psychologically and physically, as individual and en masse. The Act of Killing is a study of the genocide and abuse in 1960s Indonesia. It follows the perpetrators, who, more than explaining what occurred, act it out on film, in scenes that are relentlessly gut-churning and surreal in equal measure. Facebook page here.

Sunday, 21 February — Fifi Rong, 19:30, €12/€10, Sugar Club

Beijing-born and London-based, Fifi Rong reworks British trip-hop with her own take on traditional Chinese music, inflecting that branch of electronica with new phrasing. She’s guested and sung with Skepta and Tricky, but developed her sound alone, recording late into the night in her bedroom. More details about the gig here. The Facebook page is here.

Monday, 22 February —Spotlight, 20:00, €9, IFI

In Tim McCarthy’s newsroom drama, Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams and Mark Ruffalo are the Boston Globe investigative team who, in 2002, uncovered the widespread child abuse carried out by Catholic priests in their Massachusetts community. Learn more about the film here.

Jesse Jones has commissioned American composer Gerald Busby and worked with a special curatorial team to create a “Feminist Para-Institute” within the Hugh Lane. No More Fun and Games is Jones’s own addition to the gallery’s Artist as Witness series, and uses workshops, tours and writing to explore how art by women is valued in the Irish collective memory, and how gender equality is addressed in our construction of history. More here.